TWEETS

interview | odesza

Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight, aka electronic music duo ODESZA, are gearing up to release their third album A Moment Apart and go off on a big old tour, so we grabbed the pair to hear how all the features on the record came together an just what they’ve got in store for their live shows…

Where are you and what have you been up to today?

At our home studio in Seattle, Washington rehearsing for our upcoming tour in between a few interviews. The tour opens with a festival called Bumbershoot here in Seattle, so we’re very much looking forward to playing a lot of new music for our hometown.

Your new album A Moment Apart is almost with us, how has your sound progressed from In Return to now?

There are some distinct phases of our career that we equate with each album. Our first album Summer’s Gone was us getting to know each other and discovering our sound. In Return was us becoming songwriters, and this new album A Moment Apart is us telling more of a story in our music. It’s also the culmination of us trying to evolve our sound to be bigger and more cinematic.

You’ve got some interesting features on the record, including the likes of RY X, Regina Spektor and Leon Bridges. Was there one guest in particular that you were really pleased to get on a track?

All the featured artists on the record were really a pleasure to work with, so that’s a tough question to answer. The way Regina Spektor’s track came together was one of those “once-in-a-lifetime” moments for us. We’ve been fans of hers for a long time and we’d sent her a rough version of an idea we had for a song specifically for her. We didn’t hear back for a while, but eventually she hit us back when she had a tour stop in Seattle and told us she wanted us to hear her idea for the song. We thought we were going to hear a recording, but instead she played back our demo from her laptop and sang the entire song to us in her hotel room. It was a surreal experience and her take on the song was perfect – we didn’t change a thing and she recorded it a couple weeks later.

You’re taking the album on a big tour, what’s the live set up going to be for you guys?

We’ll be touring with our live band setup, where the two of us have the controllers, drum machines and acoustic drums, plus two horn players and a guitar player. We also have a few surprises in store for this run that we can’t quite talk about yet.